Monday, 18 February 2019

Alphabetically Speaking Again

A couple of days ago I mentioned naming a protagonist Xanthe in my quest to occupy he alphabet. It's rare for me to invent a single character with no family (whether by blood or by love) so twenty-year-old Xanthe Persimmon has parents named Rupert and Cordelia. She has elder siblings named Azure and Violet (girls) and Sage, Indigo, and Rouge (boys). Rupert had six elder sisters, the formidable Persimmon aunts and a powerful mother. None of their names have been given, but I immediately found myself wondering what they were. I'm pretty sure one of them is called Jonquil.

There's a waterfolk man named Julius (the males often have classical names) and a hob maid named Pennyroyal Cassidy, as well as her husband (unnamed as yet) and Xanthe's friend Janet Leith, the seaman Lore Mor Arlodh, his grandfather Mull and another young woman named Nell. Then there's Parsifal Brioche... quite a lot of new names to add to my collection considering the story itself is shy of 20,000 words. Not all these characters play large parts and indeed many of them are mentioned only briefly, but it goes to show the huge numbers of characters writers produce when bouncing about the alphabet.